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Almost all Quality professionals have heard of the benefits of Six Sigma Quality. How can it be ignored? Companies like GE, Motorola, and AlliedSignal have already saved billions of dollars with their Six Sigma Quality initiatives. According to Jack Welch, GE CEO, “the financial rationale for embarking on this quality journey is clear.” But are the results of a Six Sigma implementation as clear for small companies?
The Requirements of Six Sigma
Let’s first start with a short list of requirements for successfully implementing Six Sigma quality in any organization. Then we’ll discuss the requirement differences in relation to large and small companies.
While many other requirements are applicable, I personally believe that these are the most important:
•Management Team Buy-in and Support
•Education and Training
•Resource Committment
•Link to Compensation
Management Team Buy-in and Support
If your executive team is not fully supportive and proactive in establishing your Six Sigma Quality initiative, you will be wasting everyone’s time. As with any successful initiative implementation, everyone’s actions need to be tied to the initiative.
A useful exercise in determining buy-in is to list out all the individuals of the management team on a piece of paper. Then assign a positive, neutral or negative to each person signifying what you believe to be their support for the initiative. Your job, before beginning the implementation, is to move every single person to at least a neutral position, if not positive. Education can help with this goal.
Education and Training
Many educational programs currently exist; most provided by consulting companies. A list of the most reputable consultants can be found in the Six Sigma Consultants category of the iSixSigma directory.
What training is necessary? Well, it depends on who is getting trained. Here’s a snapshot table identifying the major groups of individuals, the suggested...
